Please Stop Praying for Me

Dear friends, family, and the kind strangers I’ve met along the way: Please stop praying for me. It’s only making it worse.

In April 2012, I went for an ordinary yearly physical and found that I was anemic. A colonoscopy later discovered a stage 2 cancerous tumor in my colon. A week later, it was surgically removed. This was followed by twelve rounds of chemotherapy administered through a Mediport placed in my chest. The treatment took over twenty-four weeks and removed me from employment for the rest of that year.

But the year 2013 started off great. I was back to physical health and back to work; the effects of chemo had worn off, and I was feeling fine. The year 2013 was about to close—Christmas and New Year celebrations were being planned—when in December, a follow-up CT scan discovered that a cyst on my liver previously thought to be benign had tripled in size and was actually cancerous. The original colon cancer had metastasized. Four weeks later, in January 2014, I went back under the blade and half my liver was removed. By that time, the tumor was five centimeters in size. Surgery was followed by eight rounds of chemotherapy (cut short so I could return to work to retain my medical benefits).